Marxism or nationalism?
Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question
By Michael Löwy
Pluto Press, 1998
108 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Review by Doug Lorimer
Michael Löwy, director of Research in Sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, states in the introduction to Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question: "... essays in this volume are of two kinds: first, comments on some important aspects of Marxist theory in relation to the national question; and second, an attempt to analyse, from a Marxist perspective, some contemporary forms of nationalism and internationalism".
With regard to second aim, the book does provides some interesting comments. However, it fails completely when it comes to providing an elucidation of "Marxist theory in relation to the national question". This is because Löwy explicitly rejects Marxism's scientific theory of the nation in favour of the subjectivist (idealist) theory of nations as "imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) or cultural creations (Eric Hobsbawm)", a theory which is widely fashionable among "radical" intellectuals.
Löwy centres his criticism of the Marxist theory of nations on Joseph Stalin's 1913 article "Marxism and the National Question". While acknowledging that "Lenin was particularly enthusiastic about it", Löwy claims that this article "implicitly and explicitly differs from, and even contradicts, Lenin's writings" on the national question.
What were the main ideas in Stalin's article? Not long after it was published in the Bolshevik theoretical magazine Proveshcheniye ("Enlightenment"), Lenin pointed out that the "fundamentals of a national program for [Russian] Social Democracy have recently been dealt with in Marxist theoretical literature (the most prominent place being taken by Stalin's article)". In his 1940 biography of Stalin, the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky observed that Stalin's article "set out by counterposing the historico-materialistic definition of the nation to the abstracto-psychological" theory developed by the Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer.
"A nation", Stalin wrote, "is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture". He added, "A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism".
Thus, in the Bolsheviks' view, a nation is not an "imaginary community" but an objective social entity formed historically on the basis of capitalist economic relations, which give rise among people living in a definite territory to a common language and a common culture.
It is sheer idealism to speak of the formation of a nation without all of the features listed by Stalin — without a distinct, cohesive set of capitalist commodity-money (market) relations, without a definite territory upon which that economy operates, without a common language that facilitates generalised commodity production and exchange, and without these material relations being manifested in the social psychology of the community of people based on these relations through a distinct common culture.
Stalin's definition of a nation, Trotsky observed, "compounding the psychological attributes of a nation with the geographic and economic conditions of its development, is not only correct theoretically but also practically fruitful, for then the solution to the problem of each nation's fate must perforce be sought along the lines of changing the material conditions of its existence, beginning with territory".
However, Löwy argues that the concept of "common psychological make-up ... is not at all Leninist" and is a "legacy from Bauer, whom Lenin explicitly criticised for his 'psychological theory'" of nations.
While claiming to endorse Lenin's views on the national question, Löwy, in the essay following the one cited above, endorses Bauer's theory of the nation, as well as Bauer's "practical" solution to the problem of national oppression — "national-cultural autonomy". This is despite Lenin's criticism of Bauer's solution as a "reactionary, pernicious, petty-bourgeois nationalist" policy.
What were the issues involved in the dispute between the Bolsheviks and the Austrian Social-Democrats on national policy? Trotsky provided a summary in his biography of Stalin.
"In the sphere of theory", Trotsky explained, "the Austrian Social Democracy, in the persons of Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, considered nationality independent of territory, economy and class, transforming it into a species of abstraction limited by so-called 'national character'. In the field of national policy, as for that matter in all other fields, it did not venture beyond a corrective of the status quo.
"Fearing the very thought of dismembering the monarchy, the Austrian Social Democracy strove to adapt its national program to the borders of the patchwork state. The program of so-called 'national-cultural autonomy' required that the citizens of one and the same nationality, irrespective of their dispersal over the territory of Austria-Hungary and irrespective of the administrative divisions of the state, should be united, on the basis of purely personal attributes, into one community for the solution of their 'cultural' tasks (the theatre, the church, the school, and the like).
"That program was artificial and utopian, in so far as it attempted to separate from territory and economy in a society torn by social contradictions; it was at the same time reactionary, in so far as it led to a forced disunion into various nationalities of the workers of one and the same state, undermining their class strength."
Lenin's position, Trotsky observed, was the "direct opposite" of Bauer's in both theory and policy: "Regarding nationality as unseverably connected with territory, economy and class structure, he refused at the same time to regard the historical state, the borders of which cut across the living body of the nations, as a sacrosanct and inviolate category. He demanded the recognition of the right to secession and independent existence for each national portion of the state.
"In so far as the various nationalities, voluntarily or through force of necessity, coexist within the borders of one state, their cultural interests must find the highest possible satisfaction within the framework of the broadest regional (and consequently, territorial) autonomy, including statutory guarantees of the rights of each minority. At the same time, Lenin deemed it the incontrovertible duty of all the workers in a given state, irrespective of nationality, to unite in one and the same class organisations."
Stalin's article was written at Lenin's urging, and under his close intellectual guidance, precisely to expose the incompatibility of Bauer's theory and policy on the national question with that of Marxism.
Yet Löwy claims that "Marx and Engels's incomplete theory of nationalities", (which he correctly notes was based on the "concept of a nation as a historical formation linked to the rise of the capitalist mode of production"), "could be developed in a dogmatic, Eurocentric and evolutionist way (as Stalin did) or in an emancipatory and dialectical way (as Lenin, Bauer and others did)".
This attempt to counterpose the "main ideas" expressed in Stalin's 1913 article (which Löwy acknowledges it is "obvious" were "those of the Bolshevik Party and Lenin") to the Marxist views of Lenin and the anti-Marxist, nationalist views of Bauer, would be comical for the shabbiness of the intellectual trickery involved if it were not for the fact that Löwy's publisher is promoting him to readers as a "one of the most versatile Marxist intellectuals of our time"!